After the devastating and heartbreaking loss of my 4th pregnancy I told my husband to find someone else who would be able to give him children as I obviously couldn’t. He looked at me and said, “I don’t want children if I can’t have them with you. But we have to leave and go faraway.”
The pressure at this stage was enormous. I felt like I was letting myself down. I also felt like I was letting down the whole world. People we didn’t even know and had no vested interest in my life commented about how I was disrespecting my husband because I was taking too long to get pregnant since I was still in college. Family members were offended by my miscarriages like it was them who were suffering or their bodies that were ravaged by the physical pain of loss and the unbearable emotional pain. My husband felt helpless because he didn’t know how to fix it so Taurai decided that moving to another country for a while would help both of us find ourselves through the pain of our loss and the onslaught of comments and judgments from people we had expected to support us.
Our baby had been born pre-term and during the time our baby was in hospital struggling to survive, my husband went back to work. For a long time, I was angry with him until he told me that he had gone back to work because it was the only thing he felt he could control. The fact that he couldn’t protect our baby from suffering or death and me from the pain of loss was heart wrenching for him. After the small memorial he held me as I cried and cried. He had to be strong for me and he had no one to lean on. Imagine how tough that must have been for him.
When a man loves a woman he wants to protect and provide for her. Nowadays this doesn’t mean protection from wild animals and marauding invaders but from other seemingly harmless things that can cause trauma and devastation.
Most of the people who gave me a hard time were women. I thought they would understand that the situation I was in was very painful for me and they would want to protect me. Similarly people who think they know the couple from glimpses of photographs and videos they have seen in the media feel they can comment tell them how they should live their life. Isn’t freedom part of a human right? Don’t we all have a right to choose how we want to live our lives? What makes Harry and Meghan different? Are they not human beings like everyone else?
Have you heard people commenting that she made him do this or do that? It’s like when a man marries he becomes a child. (Though if you know children they will not do anything they don’t want easily or without a fight). He cannot think for himself and God forbid if they make a decision as a couple it’s always the woman’s fault. I cannot understand that logic at all. A grown man like Harry surely is grown up enough, smart enough, mature enough and knows his own mind enough to choose his own future. Don’t you think he has a right to protect his family the best way he can under the circumstances? While we don’t choose which family we’re born in, we can choose how we live our own lives.
Any living organism will do everything it can to survive and sometimes that might mean leaving behind everything and everyone to have a chance to survive as individuals and as a couple. We left our birth country and settled in Ireland and surprisingly we had a daughter who became a true blessing for us. Maybe this change will be good for them and give their marriage a chance to grow & thrive instead of fighting fires all the time. I wish them all the best.
